Hello, I know this has been discussed a little in the RSS thread somewhere, but I was wondering what the official line is about using the shapeways service without going through the main interface.

I have an external site at www.uptomuch.co.uk that currently has a neat embedded etsy gizmo, but what I'd really like is to have my own gizmo that will automatically update with a shopfront of my products from etsy _and_ from shapeways. Essentially I'm planning on writing a simple page scraper that will look through my shapeways shop, harvest my products and deliver them as a bit of xml ready to be integrated into my own site with my own styles and branding. When a user clicks a link, then naturally they are taken to the shapeways site, and any shopping basket lives there.

I understand that there might be a problem with that - that the shapeways site itself could decline in importance (it might just end up as a manufacturer and a shopping cart / payment processor). And you'd be paying to serve up lots of data, but not getting the advantage of being able to control how it's presented and branded.

Let me know if this would cause frowns at shapeways hq!

We're a technical bunch here on shapeways too - I'm surprised something like this does not already exist? Or does it?

Cheers Joris, I'd forgotten about the uploading API, that was designed as a way for modelling programs to offer a "send to shapeways" type button? Is there any reason why we can't write our own co-creator-type programs,or model generators using this API?